The fact that the election did not deliver a landslide victory to the Democrats, and thereby a repudiation of the president, means that Donald Trump will continue to play a leadership role in the Republican Party long after January 20th. As long as he holds 80% of the Republican electorate in his thrall, anyone seeking high elective office as a Republican will need to go down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring, swearing their fealty to the former president.
Trump’s stranglehold on his party might be loosened if the folks at Fox News were to start inching away from him, but what would be their incentive for doing so? Trump’s base constitutes the bulk of their viewership so it wouldn’t make sense to risk alienating them. And it would be a major strategic error to anger Trump to the extent that he establishes his own competing right-wing network.
Of course, a Trumpist Republican party would be a minority party in these United States, and it’s not clear how many elections Trumpist Republican candidates would win when Trump himself is no longer on the ticket. But non-Trumpist Republicans would be unlikely to win many elections either. The whole situation doesn’t bode well for either the party or the country.
In the long run, we can only hope that Democrats learn the lessons of Trump’s ascendency and start doing right by working-class Americans. Eventually that might reduce his influence.
There’s also the fact that Trump may well be indicted by prosecutors in New York and end up going to prison, or be forced into personal bankruptcy when his $300–400 million dollars in debts come due. Either of those would presumably limit his influence as much as anything else, and they are not mutually exclusive.
In the meantime, the anti-Trump schadenfreude continues, as demonstrated by this example that Jennifer came across yesterday:
